No longer just an interesting add-on, video has become an important feature for anyone concerned with SEO, conversion rates, or brand recognition. That’s pretty much everyone, then.

So how exactly does video marketing affect your site’s SEO, and how can you use it in your content marketing strategy? Below are four key SEO metrics, and some best practices for using video to climb the search engine rankings:

Videos Rank in SERPs

Ranking on the Google’s first page is an SEO’s top priority, so it is difficult to ignore the 2009 Forrester study that says “pages with video are 53x more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results.” Yes, that study is five years old, but the point remains – Google SERPs prioritize video results.

Why is video marketing 53x more likely to rank than plain text content? A number of factors influence ranking, but a big one is a recent Google search algorithm update – Hummingbird – which prizes “quality content” over keyword optimization.

Google now cares less about whether you’ve optimized each individual page on your site to a particular keyword and more about whether your page’s content answers the question presented by the search user.

Google’s Head of Web spam, Matt Cutts, estimates the Hummingbird update in September 2013 affected over 90% of search queries. The way that most people use the internet fundamentally changed, and the shift toward helpful video content in SERPs is still in full swing.

Videos Make People Click

An aimClear study shows that search results with video have a “41% higher click-through rate than plain text.” This happens primarily because of rich-video snippets beside search results.

These video thumbnails advertise quality video content and make results with embedded video stand out in a text-only wasteland.

YouTube automatically creates these thumbnails (they understand how powerful snippets are), but don’t rely on YouTube to do the dirty work for you. Rich video snippets from your YouTube channel take users directly to YouTube – not your domain. You don’t garner any SEO benefits from lost traffic, even if you’re getting loads of views.

You’ve worked hard to create a valuable video, so reap the rewards (read: traffic) by embedding the video directly to your site – like on a landing page with a clear call to action. YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosting providers like Wistia, offer increased reach, but nothing beats the SEO benefits of landing page video marketing right on your domain.

In 2012, Google introduced a new metric into their search ranking algorithm called “dwell time,” which monitors the amount of time users spend on a website after click-through from the SERP. The longer a user spends on a site, the more likely the content is relevant to their query. Google gives relevant sites more clout via “Page Authority.”

While dwell time isn’t a perfect system for determining Page Authority (or the only factor by a long shot), it greatly enhances the algorithms’ ability to identify quality content – a key metric in the Hummingbird update. Video buys your site those crucial seconds that make all the difference.

One comScore study of retail sites shows that “visitors who view video stay two minutes longer and are 64% more likely to purchase than other site visitors.” Combine high dwell time with low bounce rates, and you’ll have a killer one-two SERP ranking punch (not to mention increased conversion rates, but that’s a story for another article).

Best Practices to Reduce Bounce Rate:

Embed Video “Above the Fold” – The fold is the imaginary line where users have to scroll to see additional content. On most browsers it’s around 600 pixels.

Use Accurate Video Titles – Don’t deceive users with sensationalized headlines. No one likes being lied to and if they feel betrayed, there’s no way they’ll return for a second visit.

Don’t Panic – A 50% bounce rate is ok.

Videos Build Links

In the same Moz 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factor study, the next 12 top factors directly related to SERP ranking had to do with links. Casey Henry at Moz summed up video marketing’s role in creating links when he said, “Having a video compared to just text will almost triple the average number of linking domains.” Awesome, video generates links. But why?

As much as us SEOs like to get in our own world of optimization, it is easy to forget that all the content we create is for users (you know, those real life people reading things everywhere).

In a world where even thoughtful articles get scanned and skimmed, videos are beacons of brevity, but also a signal of intent that yes, I want to communicate something to you. This “content” is going to be something you enjoy. Videos are informative, but easy to consume.

In another Forrester study, Dr. James McQuivey said, “A video is worth 1.8 million words,” and he wasn’t just being cheeky. If a picture is worth a thousand words, and video shoots at 30 frames per second, then a 60-second video really does contain the equivalent of 1.8 million words.

But a video’s value goes further than just being information dense or shareable. People like video because it is useful.

Josh Hardwick published a great video SEO article at Kissmetrics and in it he urged companies to make “videos that offer something to the viewer.” He goes on to say:

People don’t link to or share any old rubbish these days. So, to get the success you’re looking for, it’s important for you to really think about who you want to share the video and who you want to link to it.

Video communicates useful information quickly, and allows people a chance to sample content before committing to lengthy articles, but quality video with a specific marketing goal creates great backlinks to your site.

Her experiment compared two posts – one featuring a 25-second video introduction and another on the same topic with only text. The video introduction post received 200%–300% more pageviews and social shares (Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, and Twitter) than the text-only article.